Section 8.1. The Elements of Styles

At the simplest level, a style is nothing more than a rule that tells
the browser how to render a particular HTML or XHTML
tag's contents.[2] Each tag has a number of
style properties associated with it, whose values define how that tag
is rendered by the browser. A rule defines a specific value for one
or more properties of a tag. For example, most tags have a
color property, the value of which defines the
color in which Netscape or Internet Explorer should display the
contents of the tag. Other properties include fonts, line spacing,
margins, borders, sound volume, and voice, which we describe in
detail later in this chapter.

[2] We explicitly
avoided the term "display" here
because it connotes visual presentation, whereas the CSS2 standard
works hard to suggest many different ways of presenting the tagged
contents of a document.

There are three ways to attach a style to a tag: inline, on the
document level, or through the use of an external style sheet. You
may use one or more style sheets for your documents. The browser
either merges the style definitions from each style or redefines the
style characteristic for a tag's contents. Styles
from these various sources are applied to your document, combining
and defining style properties that cascade from external style sheets
through local document styles, ending with inline styles. This
cascade of properties and style rules gives rise to the
standard's name: Cascading Style Sheets.

We cover the syntactic basics of the three style-sheet techniques
here. We delve more deeply into the appropriate use of inline,
document-level, and external style sheets at the end of this chapter.

8.1.1 Inline Styles: The style Attribute

The
inline
style is the simplest way to attach a style to a tag ? just
include a style attribute with the tag along with
a list of properties and their values. The browser uses those style
properties and values to render the contents of that tag.

For instance, the following style tells the browser to display the
level-1 header text, "I'm so
bluuuuoooo!", not only in the
<h1> tag style, but also colored blue and
italicized:

<h1 style="color: blue; font-style: italic">I'm so bluuuuoooo!</h1>

Inline styles can be difficult to maintain, because they add more
contents to their tags' definitions, making them
harder to read. Also, because they have only a local effect, they
must be sprinkled throughout your document. Use the inline
style attribute sparingly and only in those rare
circumstances when you cannot achieve the same effects otherwise.

8.1.2 Document-Level Style Sheets

The real power of style sheets becomes
more evident when you place a list of presentation rules at the
beginning of your HTML or XHTML document. Placed within the
<head> and enclosed within their own
<style> and
</style> tags, document-level style sheets
affect all the same tags within that document, except for tags that
contain overriding inline style
attributes.[3]

<style>

Function

Defines a document-level style sheet

Attributes

dir, lang, media, title, type

End tag

</style>; rarely omitted in HTML

Contains

styles

Used in

head_content

Everything between the <style> and
</style> tags is considered part of the
style rules that the browser is to apply when rendering the document.
Actually, the contents of the <style> tag
are not HTML or XHTML and are not bound by the normal rules for
markup content. The <style> tag, in effect,
lets you insert foreign content into your document that the browser
uses to format your tags.

For example, a styles-conscious browser displays the contents of all
<h1> tags as blue, italic text in an HTML
document that has the following document-level style sheet definition
in its head:

8.1.2.1 The type attribute

There are other types of style sheets available for HTML/XHTML
besides CSS. Like the JavaScript style sheets we describe in Chapter 12, they are not well supported, if at all, by the popular browsers,
so we don't spend a lot of time on them in this
book. Nonetheless, the browser needs a way to distinguish which style
sheet you use in your document. Use the
type
attribute within the <style> tag for that.
Cascading style sheets are all type
text/css; JavaScript style sheets use the type
text/javascript. You may omit the
type attribute and hope the browser figures out
the kind of styles you are using, but we suggest you always include
the type attribute, so there is no opportunity for
confusion. [Section 12.4]

8.1.2.2 The media attribute

HTML and XHTML documents can
wind up in the strangest places these days, such as on cellular
phones. To help the browser figure out the best way to render your
documents, include the media attribute within the
<style> tag. The value of this attribute is
the document's intended medium, although it
doesn't preclude rendering by other media. The
default value is screen (computer display). Other values
include tty (text only), tv
(television), projection (theaters),
handheld (PDAs and cell phones),
print (ink on paper), braille
(tactile devices), embossed (Braille printers),
aural (audio; speech synthesis, for instance), and
all (many different types of media).

If you want to explicitly list several types of media, rather than
specifying all, use a quote-enclosed,
comma-separated list of media types as the value of the
media attribute. For example:

<style type="text/css" media="screen,print">

tells the browser that your document contains CSS both for printing
and for computer displays.

Take caution when specifying media, because the browser cannot apply
the styles you define unless the document is being rendered on one of
your specified media. Thus, the browser would not apply our example
set of styles designed for media="screen,print" if
the user is, for instance, connected to the Web with a handheld
computer.

How do you create different style definitions for different media
without creating multiple copies of your document? The
CSS2 standard lets you
define media-specific style sheets through its extension to the
@import at-rule and through the
@media at-rule, which we describe in Section 8.1.4.

8.1.2.3 The dir, lang, and title attributes

As with any HTML/XHTML element, you can associate a descriptive title
with the <style> tag. If the browser
displays this title to the user, it uses the values of the
dir and lang attributes to
render it correctly. [Section 3.6.1.1] [Section 3.6.1.2] [Section 4.1.1.4]

8.1.3 External Style Sheets

You can also place style definitions into
a separate document (a text file with the MIME type of
text/css) and import this
"external" style sheet into your
document. The same style sheet can actually be used for multiple
documents. Because an external style sheet is a separate file and is
loaded by the browser over the network, you can store it anywhere,
reuse it often, and even use others' style sheets.
But most importantly, external style sheets give you the power to
influence the display styles of all related tags not only in a single
document but in an entire collection of documents.

For example, suppose we create a file named
gen_styles.css containing the following style
rule:

h1 {color: blue; font-style: italic}

For each and every one of the documents in our collections, we can
tell the browser to read the contents of the
gen_styles.css file, which in turn colors all
the <h1> tag contents blue and renders the
text in italic. Of course, that is true only if the
user's machine is capable of these style tricks,
she's using a styles-conscious browser such as
Netscape or Internet Explorer, and the style isn't
overridden by a document-level or inline style definition.

You can load external style sheets into your document in two
different ways: linking them or importing them.

8.1.3.1 Linked external style sheets

One way to load an external style sheet is
to use the <link> tag within the
<head> of your document:

Recall that the <link> tag creates a
relationship between the current document and some other document on
the Web. In this example, we tell the browser that the document named
in the href attribute is a cascading style sheet
(css), as indicated by the type
attribute. These two attributes are required. We also explicitly tell
the browser that the file's relationship to our
document is that it is a stylesheet and we provide
a title making it available for later reference by
the browser. [Section 6.7.2]

The style sheet-specifying <link> tag and
its required href and type
attributes must appear in the <head> of a
document. The URL of the style sheet may be absolute or relative to
the document's base URL.

8.1.3.2 Imported external style sheets

The second technique
for loading an external style sheet imports the file with a special
command (a.k.a.
at-rule)
within the <style> tag:

The @import at-rule expects a
single URL for the network path to the external style sheet. As shown
in this example, the URL may be either a string enclosed in double
quotes and ending with a semicolon or the contents of the
url keyword, enclosed in parentheses, with a
trailing semicolon. The URL may be absolute or relative to the
document's base URL.

The @import at-rule must appear
before any conventional style rules, either in
the <style> tag or in an external style
sheet. Otherwise, the standard insists that the browser ignore the
errant @import. By first importing all the various
style sheets, then processing document-level style rules, the CSS2
standard cascades: the last one standing wins. [Section 8.4.1.4]

The @import at-rule can appear in a document-level
style definition or even in another external style sheet, letting you
create nested style sheets.

8.1.4 Media-Specific Styles

Besides the
media
attribute for the <style> tag, the
CSS2 standard has two other
features that let you apply different style sheets, depending on the
agent or device that renders your document. This way, for instance,
you can have one style or whole style sheet take effect when your
document gets rendered on a computer screen and another set of styles
for when the contents get punched out on a Braille printer. And what
about those cell phones that access the Web?

Like the media attribute for the
<style> tag that affects the entire style
sheet, you can specify whether the user's document
processor loads and uses an imported style sheet. Do that by adding a
media-type keyword or a series of comma-separated keywords to the end
of the @import at-rule. For instance, the
following example lets the user agent decide whether to import and
use the speech-synthesis style sheet or a common PC-display and print
style sheet, if it is able to render the specified media types:

The @import CSS2 media types are the same as those
for the <style> tag's
media attribute, including all,
aural, braille,
embossed, handheld,
print, projection,
screen, tty, and
tv.

Another CSS2 way to select media is through the explicit
@media at-rule,
which lets you include media-specific rules within the same style
sheet, either at the document level or in an external style sheet. At
the document level, like @import, the
@media at-rule must appear within the contents of
the <style> tag. The at-rules may not appear
within another rule. Unlike @import,
@media may appear subsequent to other style rules,
and its style-rule contents override previous rules according to the
cascading standard.

The contents of @media include one or more
comma-separated media-type keywords followed by a curly brace
({})-enclosed set of style rules. For example:

The lt_blue attribute to the
@media at-rule causes the body's
background color to display light blue, rather than the default white
set in the general style rule, when the document is rendered on a
television or projection screen (as specified by the
tv and projection attributes).

8.1.5 Linked Versus Imported Style Sheets

At first glance, it may appear that linked and
imported style sheets are equivalent, using different syntax for the
same functionality. This is true if you use just one
<link> tag in your document. However,
special CSS2-standard rules come into play if you include two or more
<link> tags within a single document.

With one <link> tag, the browser should load
the styles in the referenced style sheet and format the document
accordingly, with any document-level and inline styles overriding the
external definitions. With two or more
<link> tags, the browser should present the
user with a list of all the linked style sheets. The user then
selects one of the linked sheets, which the browser loads and uses to
format the document; the other linked style sheets get ignored.

On the other hand, the
styles-conscious browser merges, as opposed to separating, multiple
@imported style sheets to form a single set of
style rules for your document. The last imported style sheet takes
precedence if there are duplicate definitions among the style sheets.
Hence, if the external gen_styles.css style
sheet specification first tells the browser to make
<h1> contents blue and italic, and then a
later spec_styles.css tells the browser to make
<h1> text red, then the
<h1> tag contents appear red and italic. And
if we later define another color ? say, yellow ? for
<h1> tags in a document-level style
definition, the <h1> tags are all yellow and
italic. Cascading effects. See?

In practice, the popular browsers treat linked style sheets just like
imported ones by cascading their effects. The browsers do not
currently let you choose from among linked choices. Imported styles
override linked external styles, just as the document-level and
inline styles override external style definitions. To bring this all
together, consider the example:

Using the CSS2 model, the browser should prompt the user to choose
sheet1.css or sheet2.css.
It should then load the selected sheet, followed by
sheet3.css and sheet4.css.
Duplicate styles defined in sheet3.css or
sheet4.css, and in any inline styles, override
styles defined in the selected sheet. In practice, the popular browsers
cascade the style-sheet rules as defined in the example order
sheet1 through sheet4.

8.1.6 Limitations of Current Browsers

Internet Explorer and Netscape support the
<link> tag to apply an external style
sheet to a document. Neither Netscape nor Internet Explorer supports
multiple, user-selectable <link> style
sheets, as proposed by the CSS2 standard. Instead, they
treat the <link> style sheets as they do
@import or document-level styles, by cascading the
rules.

Netscape Version 6, but not earlier versions, and Internet Explorer
Versions 5 and later honor the @import as well as
the @media at-rules, for both document-level and
external sheets, allowing sheets to be nested.

Achieving media-specific styles through external style sheets with
earlier Netscape browsers is hopeless. Assume, therefore, that most
people who have Netscape Version 4 will render your documents on a
common PC screen, so make that medium the default. Then embed all
other media-specific styles, such as those for print or Braille,
within @media at-rules, so that Internet Explorer
and other CSS-compliant agents properly select styles based on the
rendering medium. The only other alternative is to create
media-specific <style> tags within each
document. Run, do not walk, away from that idea.

8.1.7 Style Comments

Comments are welcome inside the
<style> tag and in external style sheets,
but don't use standard HTML comments; style sheets
aren't HTML. Rather, enclose style comments between
/* and
*/ markers, as we did in the example in Section 8.1.2. (Those of
you who are familiar with the C programming language will recognize
these comment markings.) Use this comment syntax for both
document-level and external style sheets. Comments cannot be nested.

We recommend documenting your styles whenever possible, especially in
external style sheets. Whenever the possibility exists that your
styles may be used by other authors, comments make it much easier to
understand your styles.

8.1.8 Handling Styleless Browsers

We have to do some fancy footwork
to allow our HTML documents to work with both older, styleless
browsers and newer, styles-conscious browsers. The order of the tags
is very important. Here's the approach, which you
may have noticed in our document-level style examples:

First, we use a <style> tag,
followed by an HTML comment, followed by our style rules. We close
the comment, and we close the </style> tag.

Newer browsers ignore HTML comments within
<style> tags, so these browsers implement
our styles correctly. Older browsers ignore what is placed between
HTML comments, so they ignore our style rules (which they would
otherwise print on the screen, to the confusion of the user).

XHTML documents require a slightly different approach. In those
documents, we enclose document-level styles in a
CDATA section
instead of in HTML comments. See Section 16.3.7
for details.

In the style sheets themselves, use style comments rather than HTML
comments. The styleless browsers won't load the
style sheets, and newer browsers interpret them correctly.

8.1.9 Style Precedence

You
may import multiple external style sheets and combine them with
document-level and inline style effects in many different ways. Their
effects cascade (hence the name, of course). You may specify the font
type for our example <h1> tag, for instance,
in an external style definition, whereas its color may come from a
document-level style sheet.

Style-sheet effects are not cumulative, however: of the many styles
that may define different values for the same property ? colors
for the contents of our example tag, for instance ? the one that
takes precedence can be found by following these rules, listed here
in order:

Sort by origin

A style defined "closer" to a tag
takes precedence over a more
"distant" style; an inline style
takes precedence over a document-level style, which takes precedence
over the effects of an external style.

If more than one applicable style exists, sort by class

A property defined as a class of a tag (see Section 8.3) takes precedence over a property defined for
the tag in general.

If multiple styles still exist, sort by specificity

The properties for a more specific contextual style (see Section 8.2.3) take precedence over properties defined
for a less specific context.

If multiple styles still exist, sort by order

The property specified latest takes precedence.

The relationship between style properties and conventional tag
attributes is almost impossible to predict. Style sheet-dictated
background and foreground colors ? whether defined externally, at
the document level, or inline ? override the various
color attributes that may appear within a tag. But
the align attribute of an inline image usually
takes precedence over a style-dictated alignment.

There is an overwhelming myriad of style and tag
presentation-attribute combinations. You need a crystal ball to
predict which combination wins and which loses the precedence battle.
The rules of redundancy and style versus attribute precedence are
elucidated in the W3C CSS2 standard, but no clear pattern of
precedence is implemented in the styles-conscious browsers. This is
particularly unfortunate because there will be an extended period,
perhaps several years, in which users may or may not use
styles-conscious browsers. Authors must implement both styles and
non-style presentation controls to achieve the same effects.

Nonetheless, our recommendation is to run ? as fast as you
can ? away from one-shot, inline, localized kinds of presentation
effects such as those afforded by the <font>
tag and color attribute. They have served their
temporary purpose; it's now time to bring
consistency (without the pain!) back into your document presentation.
Use styles. It's the HTML way.